It is of course only the playwrights who can show us the next phase in our theatre, and even they can't tell us about it in advance. They have to work it out according to their own temperament, experience, and taste, taking what advantage they can of the shifting sanctions of fashion. The by-stander can neither prophesy, nor tell the playwrights what to do. So, these remarks are offered as remote wishful thinking.

If there is a dominant fashion in playwrighting now, it consists in exploiting the mentally and morally underprivileged, the lonely, frustrated, and pathological, to express the playwright's own desperate feelings about “our times.” As Mr. Martin Esslin says in his excellent Theatre of the Absurd, “A feeling of helplessness when confronted with the vast intricacy of the modern world, and the individual's impotence in making his own influence felt on that intricate and mysterious machinery, pervades the consciousness of Western man today…. The convict who is being physically separated from the outside world has literally been deprived of any means to make his presence felt, to make an impact on reality; and in that sense the convict experiences the human condition in our time more intensely and more directly than any of us.” What Mr. Esslin is saying here about Genet's convict applies to countless other lost figures in the contemporary theatre. And our American playwrights, whether Absurd, Beatnik, Freudian-day-dreamy, or reportorial-realistic, are portentously dredging up sad-sacks of every description as the real low-down on “the chaos of the modern world.”

The spirit of an age is known to reveal itself in everything that the age conspires to say about its engagements with itself. We have spoken about ourselves, which really means that we have spoken to ourselves, more characteristically, more obliquely, more problematically, in painting and sculpture than in the other arts. Here our dialogue has been driven by a greater underground fury, frustration in apparent freedom; here we find the aggressive jest and the sense of exhausted yet tenacious conventions still to be overcome. The novel and the film are only occasionally used for their proper purposes, and when they are they approach the graphic arts and become our autobiography. The rest is noise. It used to be that the other arts aspired towards the condition of music, but it is more nearly true to say that they now wish to reach the condition of painting and sculpture.

Has the avant-garde of drama in the Western world today reached a dead end? And where will the next development lead to? While it is clearly futile to try to predict the future, some speculation about likely trends might well help to put the present into perspective and, at the same time, clear our minds of some prevailing misconceptions.

Above all, where does today's vanguard stand? It has more than just one spearhead. In the Anglo-Saxon countries and in France one wing of the avant-garde represents a trend that goes back to the early nineteen thirties and Brecht's Epic Theatre, which could only make its full impact felt after the downfall of Hitler (whose accession to power thirty years ago put an end to any creative experiment in Germany). The other main wing of today's avant-garde has equally remote origins. The Theatre of the Absurd is the culmination of a movement which, in surrealist painting or in the writings of Kafka and Joyce, reaches back into the nineteen twenties.

“The problem, of course, is money.” As they used to say on the old radio program: Arthur J. Goldberg said it. The trouble is that everybody else has said it too, and though Arthur J. Goldberg was then Secretary of Labor and now Justice of the Supreme Court, he was a little out of order. For he ought to know that anything everybody is saying is true enough to be suspect. Money is a problem, let me not discount it; and the unions, and the movies, and the Play of the Week, and the mass media, and the proscenium arch, and fear of creeping socialism, and Minority Leader Dirksen (who helped kill the Federal Theatre by calling its plays “salacious tripe”), and the fire laws, and the decentralized hangover of Puritan morality, and “the youth of our country's culture,” and the fact that there is only one shining knight in tweeds, Tyrone Guthrie, to go around, and so on and so forth—but the true surd, the one vermiculate problem remains the people in the American theatre, those self-sacrificial lambs, who tell themselves that all the other problems are the main problem.

Ideals are fine. In most of the pages of this issue the writers are concerned with ideals. These pages are concerned with something more tangible: money.

The fact is, as we all know, today's theatre is run with money. Tomorrow's theatre, such as it may be, must also be solvent. I am not concerned, in the following paragraphs, with dreams or aspirations. I am concerned with certain economic facts of the present, certain economic trends that will shape the theatres of the future.

Who pays for the theatre in America? The audience. What is our audience today in America? First: what is our present Broadway audience?

The present Broadway audience, according to a survey made by Playbill magazine, consists of eleven million people. That is, the Broadway theatres fill about eleven million seats in a given season—sometimes the same people fill the same seats.

When we talk of the “performing arts,” we must talk about all of them: the spoken drama, musical theatre, opera, ballet, and concert music. Up until now it has been generally true in the majority of American communities that most all spaces that could seat anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand people have, at one time or another, been used for performances of every kind, size, and description. It was inevitable that the artist made compromises which lessened—sometimes almost to the vanishing point—his effectiveness as a performer. Space designed specifically as a theatre does not make a good concert hall, nor does space designed specifically as a concert hall make a good theatre. This is true visually as well as acoustically. We can demonstrate that certain transformations are possible within a single facility which will adjust both the performing and audience spaces to quite opposite and diverse uses.

I suppose the most beneficial result of your letter is the actual analysis on my part of what it is I am really doing. For many years I have been pulling better designs than the next fellow out of the hats of clients in financial corners. I can boast of never having had a rich client. I live at the top of my class but my work was at the bottom of the theatre world. I thought Izenour's theatres monstrously top-heavy, but had to admit he was more popular with the well-heeled lads and the conformists. Then someone pointed out to me the other day that perhaps I was building more theatres than he. On the other hand, your letter seemed to stigmatize my experimentation in actual “bricks-and-wood” and encourage, rather, flight-free drawings.

Finally I decided to stay with the “bricks-and-wood” and try to bring you around to a realization of what is actually going on in my world.

When I was young and easy—not so long before we really reached for the absurd—and when theatre was all the thunder and hooves of the Old Vic or, if you chose, that something wild and psychotic in Stanislavski New York, I became involved in a very curious circumstance. It was then that the possibilities of a theatre of the marvelous dawned upon me.

I was working at the time as a social investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare. My clients were the mentally deteriorating, the physically disabled, old people left alone to die, frustrated and inept unwed mothers, and last, but not by any means the least, children: in other words, people representing that large segment of our population who do not know the theatre and to whom America, itself, is one huge stage show. Indeed, when I studied their case records which read like epics, I realized that nothing in our modern theatre would be inspirational to them.

If, as I suspect, we are pausing for prophecy, then we might as well admit that, where dreams for the theatre in America are concerned, we must be so many Cassandras. The timbre of our pessimism need not ring with the old lugubrious echo of the original tragic Greek; to be fair to our time, when we have to believe that we control our fate, the echo can be taken from the Giraudoux Cassandra, ironic, bemused and mad only to those who are madder than we are. The question should not be, “What's next in theatre?” but rather, “What ought to be in theatre (and when, if ever)?” “What's next” bears the misleading implication that we have truly been somewhere in theatre and that there are signs, people, and forces clearly leading us somewhere else.